Erol Engintalay's Monomotion project is back with a thrilling new collection of tunes. Sides is an energizing and iridescent trip down the echoing, cavernous halls of dub techno, instantly conjuring the type of late nights and dark, crowded rooms that this music is meant to soundtrack. His first release in three years, Engintalay showcases a new set of talents on Sides, an affirmation of this special artist’s stylistic versatility as well as a gesture towards what’s to come from him. Sides follows 2019’s Fujisan, which captured Engintalay’s capability for crafting shimmering, gorgeous tapestries of electronic music. This time around, he’s turned towards his love of four-to-the-floor dance music—a stylistic shift inspired by time spent DJing in Paris last summer. “I wanted to get back to my origins,” he says while talking about the new sonic direction, exclaiming a sentiment shared by dance fans the world over: “I missed playing clubs and DJing!” “It brought me back to why I wanted to make music to begin with,” Engintalay reflects on a particular experience of spinning atop a Parisian terrace. “I wanted to bring the club back to my compositions.” After years of working with the famed Fruity Loops software, he switched to Ableton Live and discovered a whole new array of sounds within the production software that unlocked previously unknown potential in his music. Indeed, the title of Sides is a gesture towards Engintalay’s boundless sense of discovery when it comes to creating in the studio. “I can do a lot of different styles, I’m very versatile,” he explains. “Right now, I’m into club music, which is the music I love. I still hold the groove and the rhythm close to my heart.” “Mirage” percolates with the effervescence of classic Kompakt material, while the rubbery rhythms that course through “Echoes” are utterly entrancing—and then there’s the huge-sounding title track, which patiently builds over nearly eight minutes to a purely ecstatic peak. “It’s a banger of a track,” Engintalay marvels while talking about the song. “I imagine it being played at a warehouse with tons of people and sweating walls. It brings me a massive feeling.” And bringing that massive feeling is what Sides is all about, as Engintalay explains that exercising these new creative muscles might sound different, but in the end it’s all about his own personal love of exploring new worlds of sound. “I love to make different kinds of music, and with this project my approach hasn’t changed—I’m just doing what I love,” he says, and when it comes to Sides, you’ll find his enthusiasm contagious as a listener.